Brookshire City council reviews FY2025–26 budget, prioritizes capital projects and accounting fixes

BROOKSHIRE, Texas — The Brookshire City Council met in a special budget workshop Aug. 6 in City Council Chambers to review a proposed FY2025–26 budget, hear a finance presentation on accounting-system issues and consider a prioritized list of capital projects and operating decisions.

Natalie Lyons, the city’s accounting staff member, led a detailed presentation on the city’s current financial statements and the complications that followed a software change from ENCODE to FundView. Lyons said FundView contains many duplicate and inactive line items that made coding invoices difficult and obscured actual spending patterns; she recommended consolidating the FundView accounts back into the simpler ENCODE structure and restoring business processes, including contracting out bank reconciliation. “One department had 27 line items in ENCODE and 86 in FundView,” Lyons said. “It’s easy to mess up; we need to get back to a simpler basic operation.”

The discussion then moved to capital priorities the council may fund from projected FY2026 resources. Lyons presented a packet of projects categorized as desirable, necessary or mandatory and gave preliminary cost estimates. The packet listed projects including: Hobart’s Park soccer reconfiguration (estimated $16,400), resurfacing and reskinning work for the public works building, turf grooming at Hovis Park (about $20,284), lighting repairs at Hobart’s Park (about $12,500), a Hovis Park clubhouse remodel (estimate provided in the packet), a proposed detention/retention feature near Stalnik and Stella to address recurrent flooding in parts of the city, drainage and culvert clearing, a disaster-recovery center kitchen and generator, standby generators for several facilities (roughly $50,000 per generator in Lyons’s figures), fuel-tank replacements for public works, and additional road repairs beyond an ARPA-funded nine-road patching project already set to go to council. Lyons said completing all listed projects would cost about $1.28 million, not including cash already on hand.

Council members expressed support for including the capital list in the budget and for prioritizing mandatory items first. Multiple members said they favored funding all of the projects over time, while recognizing some would carry over into subsequent years. The council also indicated support for a proposed 3% cost-of-living adjustment for city employees; council members discussed allowing merits up to 5% with a combined not-to-exceed cap (several speakers referenced a not-to-exceed total of 8% across COLA and merit, but the final ordinance language and formal approval were not adopted at this session).

Lyons presented high-level revenue and expense comparisons and stressed caution about budgeted revenue figures. She said the prior budget included an inflated revenue target (the prior packet showed higher budgeted revenue than year-to-date receipts), and recommended projecting the FY2026 budget by annualizing the first nine months of actual activity and adding an inflation assumption. Lyons summarized cash and fund balances in the packet and noted that some special-purpose bank accounts (for example juvenile or court-security restricted funds and state forfeiture accounts) had bank balances but little or no activity coded in FundView.

Other operational items discussed included: - Bank reconciliation: Lyons recommended outsourcing bank reconciliations and reported the city previously used a vendor that became nonresponsive, prompting discontinuation. - Grant writing: Lyons said an RFQ for a grant-writer service had been posted in the newspaper. - Disaster/debris management: Lyons said the city needs a debris removal and debris-monitoring contract so costs are eligible for FEMA reimbursement and to avoid ad-hoc disposal practices used previously. - ARPA road project: Lyons said a vendor for a nine-road ARPA patching project would be on the council agenda the following day for approval and that the packet included roughly $250,000 in additional road-repair funds. - Council pay: Lyons noted a council pay increase approved previously did not take effect because the ordinance was not finalized and therefore is not reflected in current pay. - Festivals and community events: Council members discussed tentative budget amounts for community events, including National Night Out (council discussed $3,500–$4,000), Christmas programming (council discussed $20,000 as an estimate), Cinco de Mayo and Juneteenth (figures discussed near $15,000–$25,000 depending on fireworks and scope).

Council members and staff discussed drainage problems in neighborhoods such as Brookshire Garden and along Depot Street. Lyons and other participants described planned mid-mod street work that will clear ditches and replace culverts on four streets and said an allocation of $100,000 was included for broader drainage work; participants noted a proposed detention/retention pond near Stalnik and Stella would help recurring flooding if built with regional partners.

No formal motions were recorded in the transcript and the workshop did not include a recorded vote. Multiple council members verbally agreed to proceed with the packet’s priorities and directed staff to incorporate prioritized projects and proposed wages into the next budget book and subsequent meeting agenda items. Lyons said the council was scheduled for at least two more budget meetings and would receive a complete budget book with required documents before a final budget decision.

Lyons also cautioned that several dollar amounts discussed during the presentation were preliminary estimates and would be refined during the budgeting process. “A lot of these items have money just sitting there, but we never used it,” she said, describing accounts that had bank balances but no corresponding coded expenses in FundView.

The workshop closed with staff and council confirming next steps: staff will refine account consolidations for the ENCODE transition, finalize RFQs and vendor quotes (including bank-reconciliation providers and the ARPA road vendor), and prepare a full budget book for the council’s next scheduled meeting where the council may take formal action.

Brookshire’s next regularly scheduled council meeting will be the venue for any formal budget votes and for vendor approvals referenced during the workshop.